Slumber Party Massacre III (1990)

It's best to just rip off the band-aid, so double-featured this with the abysmal second act. The opening credits is a slideshow of basic photographs of young people, which unfortunately makes it the best opening credits in the trilogy. We open to kids playing beach volleyball, bad first-person camera work, bad framing, and an awful sound mix. A long-haired loner kid in all-black long clothing sits nearby and stares menacingly at the volleyball kids, and the film picks up an awful yellow tint for some shots where it looks like they reshot it on garbage film stock. This happens frequently, as if it was partially shot on 35mm and partially on Betamax.

Upon returning to her car, one of the volleyball girls gets drilled through the spine. This is far and away the most brutal and realistic drill murder in the series so far. It's followed by a music video scene in a convertible, for no reason really. Two of the bad-acting kids poorly establish the love interest subplot which will surely justify a couple of boys peering through a house window while a few girls dance in their underwear in a future scene.

It keeps cutting between extremely-high and extremely-low quality shots. The low-quality ones double in having both bad color reproduction and lack of focus. They fuck up the exposition and jump straight to the titular slumber party, which is green-tinted and out of focus. It's the worst acting and the worst dialogue of the trilogy by a long shot. The girls strip dance badly in the living room, but instead of boys peering in through the windows, the boys just walk right in. Every conversation is boring and meaningless chit-chat. Their deepest thoughts are about pepperoni pizza.

The creepy loner kid from the beach is prowling around, and somebody in a mask stabs one of the guys to death with a For Sale sign. No drills involved there, but the pizza delivery girl gets drilled soon after. It's followed by a long and boring period of character development via pairing the boys and girls, and the only thing of interest is the swordfish harpoon that we can clearly see hanging in the background, and that obviously nobody has brought to a horror movie set without the intention of using.

A couple of the murder shots are really well done, as if they were shot by an entirely different filmmaker, since the rest of it is awful. The highlight is the electrocution-in-the-bathtub hair dryer murder, which is beautifully shot, despite having no drills. The bathtub murder also kicks off house-wide panic.

In the first actual plot point of the entire series, one of the boys suddenly wails on another with a sledgehammer, then saws into his ankles with a chainsaw. What a twist! The other kids are at home around the fire, as you would be if your friend had just been murdered upstairs. They remember to check the windows, and find the loner beach kid dead in the basement. Their phone is working perfectly, and there are plenty of neighbors, and they have cars, but they just stay inside and give up. Murder boy comes home with a big drill and uses it like a knife instead of a drill. Thus begins the Scooby Doo portion of tonight's film. The girls don't understand how windows work, so they bang on them and scream.

One of the girls harpoons him in the thigh, which is considerably less exciting than I had hoped. The disappointment continues as they defeat him by tossing a bucket of household bleach at him, causing him to poke his drill around stupidly in an awful interpretation of chemical blindness. One of the girls tells him he can touch her boobs, briefly delaying his false-blind rampage until he remembers he's a drill murderer and does some drill murdering. The other girls just watch in silence and do absolutely nothing to help. There's some more Scooby Doo, and somebody finally drills him to death.

Writer Catherine Cyran would go on to specialize in made-for-TV Christmas movies, and director Sally Mattison was relegated to producer rolls for softcore Skinemax flicks.